WooCommerce is an open-sourcee-commerceplugin for WordPress. It is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using WordPress. Launched on September 27, 2011, the plugin quickly became popular for its simplicity to install and customize and free base product.
History
WooCommerce was first developed by WordPress theme developer WooThemes, who hired Mike Jolley and James Koster, developers at Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop that became WooCommerce. In August 2014, WooCommerce powered 381,187 sites. In November 2014, the first WooConf, a conference focusing on eCommerce using WooCommerce was held in San Francisco, California. It attracted 300 attendees. In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were acquired by Automattic, operator of WordPress.com and core contributor to the WordPress software.
Usage
WooCommerce is used by a number of high-traffic websites such as Small Press Expo. For the 3rd week of September 2015, Trends indicated that WooCommerce ran on 30% of e-commerce sites and millions of active installs. Ecommerce is rapidly growing worldwide and WooCommerce has over 39 million downloads as a plugin and is currently active on more than three million websites and is the most popular eCommerce platform in 2018. WooCommerce has approximately 4% of the top million HTML pages. In 2015, statistics show that the percentage of online stores that utilize WooCommerce through Wordpress.org's plugin is more than 30% of all stores. The current 2019 market share for WooCommerce is 22% of the top 1 million sites using eCommerce technologies. Since Automattic's acquisition WooCommerce has kept gaining market share, and has now become one of the leading E-commerce platforms on the Internet.
Themes
With many Woocommerce-ready themes sold on third party websites it makes it difficult to exactly estimate how many themes can be associated with this Wordpress plugin, but here are some Woocommerce stats for the bigger theme providers.
There are 1,135 Woocommerce themes on ThemeForest.
The Wordpress.org theme directory has 548 WooCommerce themes.
Extensions
WooCommerce has attracted significant popularity because the base product, in addition to many extensions and plugins, is free and open-source. In 2018, WooCommerce has near 330 extensions and over 1,000 plugins. In addition, there are thousands of paid add-ons for fixed prices. Many Premium Themes now offer capability with WooCommerce as well as plugins that make a theme framework compatible. Notable WooCommerce extensions include:
WooCommerce Bookings: Which allows users to sell blocks of time as appointments.
WooCommerce Memberships: which allows the user to restrict access to certain parts of their Wordpress website, and sell access to these parts of the website.
WooExpert Partner program
Instead of a certification program WooCommerce uses an official partnership program. WooCommerce recommends users to use these WooExperts for their WooCommerce projects. Suppliers can apply to become a partner and by doing so will undergo a multi-stage application process that includes skill evaluation and an interview. Throughout the process WooCommerce aim to assess familiarity with WooCommerce core and extensions. The partnership program had either a Gold, Silver or Bronze level until late 2017, when it moved to a flat "verified WooExpert" system.
Revenues
A study conducted in 2017 by Todd Wilkins, Head of WooCommerce, suggests that WooCommerce stores would collectively account for nearly $10 billion in sales.
